Gone Fishin'

I suppose it started with Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall, the floppy-haired and engaging cook and food enthusiast of TV’s River Cottage series. Week after week Hugh grows, hunts and finds ingredients for an always wonderful meal which he whips up on the beach, in a field, or on a boat in what always seems to be perfect weather with a bunch of really good mates.

In the recent series, Hugh was catching fish. He made it seem entrancing.  And the idea is, O Idle Viewer, that we couch potatoes can also pop down to Jersey for a bit of Sea Bream or up to Skye for a chance at the mackerel etc, etc.  (The episode where he ate a bit of jellyfish is not one I’m going to copy.)  But, jellyfish aside, it all looked wonderful.

And, d’you know, I’ve got a fishing rod.  To be honest, I’m not sure why.  I’ve spent various seaside holidays where we’ve succumbed to the lure of fishing trips, and then I've  been lumbered with doing something (like cleaning, scaling, gutting and cooking) to a mixed batch of finny denizens.  And, what with one thing and another, I’ve been led to reflect that seaside fish is better deep-fried and wrapped in newspaper with plenty of vinegar and a portion of chips.  But Hugh F-W made it look sooooo much fun.   “Can we,” said Helen, swivelling round from the couch where she’d potatoed, “go fishing?”

Now, there’s certain obstacles to be overcome; even the most passionate Mancunian will agree that Manchester is not lapped by the ocean waves. Or traversed by swiftly-flowing rivers (not that you’d want to eat out of, at any rate) or, indeed, the willow-fringed, grassy-banked, sparkling trout streams of my imagination.  So when I went to the local angling shop, and asked where I could go fishing, I wasn’t very surprised when the bloke behind the counter shrugged and said, “The canal.”

Oh, and I needed a rod-licence, too. And a landing-net. And bait?

Nothing, I said firmly, as he reached for the maggots, that’s minging.

Maggots are undeniably minging.

Plastic maggots, then?

Plastic maggots?

So, yeah, okay, I know it’s odd, but I spent £1.99 on a packet of plastic maggots.  They smell of pineapple which fish apparently find irresistible.  They like sweetcorn too, apparently. Where on earth do the fish get these advanced tastes from?  I can understand a fish in the Huddersfield Canal being switched on by the scent of old shopping trolleys and take-away cartons, but sweetcorn and pineapples?  Maybe they migrate…

So armed with niffy plastic maggots, sweetcorn, a rod licence, a net and a bit of hope, I stationed myself by the canal, baited the rod and waited.  Helen sat on the picnic rug and, sketch book in hand, whiled away the time until she could get busy with the landing-net.

Now before anyone wonders if they’ll shortly be called up upon to choose between flowers or a donation to charity, let me reassure you.  There is no way, ever, that I would eat anything out of that canal.  All I want to do is snare a fish, admire it, take its photograph and return it to its native element. This (see my thoughts on cleaning, scaling, gutting and cooking above) seems like a good deal to me. I’m not sure what the fish would think, but it might entertain some mordant thoughts on the nuttiness of human behaviour.

The fish tried.  They loved the sweetcorn.  They ate it off the hook and came back for more.  That rod is the most complicated way of giving a fish a healthy snack ever devised.  We re-baited the hook and tried again.  And again.  And then It Happened.  There was a massive tug at the line.  Now, there’s not just tiddlers in that canal.  There’s at least one twenty-pound pike and the way the rod bent double I could believe I’d got it.  The line must have stretched, because I reeled in and reeled in and still there was a terrific threshing in the murky waters.  “Reel it in, Mum!” yelled Helen.  “I’m doing it!” I said… And then Helen put the net in the water. Now she didn’t mean to hit the fish, but she did.  And broke the line. There was a clunk, a final tug and the fish was gone.  An irritated-looking shiny black back rose twice out of the water and that was it.  This never happened to Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall.  Fishing on the telly is easy.

Frankie's Letter

Whisper it softly, but I think I’ve just published a book.  Yes, I know, it’s normally something anyone’s in two minds about, but this is an ebook, you see, and I’ve got nothing to hold in my hand.  You know when you go onto Amazon? Well, buried in the reviews and the ratings and all the general gubbins, there’s a bright little message saying words to the effect of, “Are you an author or publisher?  Then publish on Kindle!”

Now, I’ll be honest.  I’m not a Luddite, exactly, but I’d never really fancied ebooks all that much.  And then our Jenny celebrated her 16^th birthday with an ipad.  Wow.  I mean, seriously, wow.  It works like greased lightning and the books on it are amazing. Ebooks suddenly seemed like a really good idea.

So I thought okey-doke….  As it happens, I have a book – a book that I’m very fond of – that’s never seen the light of day. It’s called Frankie’s Letter – remember that title.  Make a note.  A note to the tune of, “Frankie’s Letter.  What an enthralling title for a book.  You know, I’d love to read a book called Frankie’s Letter.  Frankie’s Letter sounds terrific.  I wish I owned a book called Frankie’s Letter.”  Bounce up and down on the spot if you like – I’m not at all judgemental and, besides, it’ll entertain the kids and bewilder the cat.   Frankie’s Letter. It’s not a Jack Haldean but a complete new venture.  It’s a First World War spy thriller, which I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing.  I’ve always wanted to write about the period of the First World War, but I didn’t want to write a war story as such.  The war was so immense and so shattering to the people in it, that simply telling a straight-forward war story seemed – well, irrelevant, somehow.  After all, with the world crashing round your ears, hunting out fingerprints and pondering long and hard about how deeply the parsley had sunk into the butter on a hot day or whatever seemed trivial.  I mean, I’m as fond of sunken parsley as the next person, so to speak, but the circumstances have to be right.

And then I got my big idea.  Yup, write about the war but write about the war from a distance.  I needed someone who was capable of acting on their own (as a hero who has to keep trotting off for orders is not very heroic!) who was affected by the war and, ideally, could affect the war too.  Hang on a mo.  What about a secret agent?  What indeed. And so Anthony Brooke was born.

He was and is a doctor, but, because of his fluency in German (Hey!  He’s my hero!  He can have whatever attributes that come in handy!) he gets swept up and sent of to Germany at the start of the war as an undercover agent.  All is well until another agent comes staggering into his room and, with his dying breath, tells Anthony there’s a spy in England who knows Big Stuff and, if Anthony reads Frankie’s letter, it’ll tell him all about it.  That’s the start and I think it’s pretty good, not to be overly modest about it. Anthony ends up back in Dear Old Blighty where there’s some very dodgy dealings going on, with beautiful, jewel-encrusted women, mysterious deaths, more spies (it was sort of “buy one, get one free in the spy shop” that day) grand country mansions, a spot of romance (see the jewel-encrusted woman above) and so on and so forth.  Ace.

So back to the Kindle process.  There’s a nice little message when you’ve finished uploading the book to say that for the next 48 hours your precious book is going to be “Previewed” (a sort of electronic limbo, I suppose) and then… Well, hopefully it’ll be on my Amazon page and everyone can get stuck in and start reading.  But it is odd about all this electronic stuff.  Somehow or other it’s hard to believe it’s real.  Fingers crossed.  Oh, and did I mention the title? Frankie’s Letter.

The gentle art of getting noticed

As you can see from the excited squeak of joy below about Killer Books, I was pretty pleased with things this week.  I seemed to spend so long chewing the carpet about not being published, that when it finally happened, I thought words to the effect of “Here we go!  It’s all plain sailing from now on.”  (As a matter of fact, I thought nothing nearly so coherent;  I thought, if you can dignify the process by the word “thought” “!!!@**” or perhaps “???” and even,“^&%!!” with a quick “$*&!!£!^^” thrown in for good measure.)

And, I must say, being published is a lot – so much - better than not being published but it does mean that there’s new challenges.  Publicity, for instance.  Now you know – because you’re obviously a well informed, thoughtful type of person – that my books are excellent.  Not only are they easy to read with gripping stories, they can, at a pinch, be used to prop up a wonky table, stop a sofa cushion from sagging, provide a really classy mouse mat, serve as a platform for a performing gerbil or act as a very small pillow.  However, not everyone knows that.

And that’s where publicity comes in.  When two or three writers are gathered together, it’s the subject that always crops up.  This isn’t personal, you understand.  I am typical of many and live for Art alone, but editors love sales.  It’s just altruistic kindness to them, you understand.  So what on earth, apart from shouting in the street, which will earn you nothing but censorious glances, can you do?  Well, there’s magazines, of course.  Writing Magazine is always a good bet, as they frequently carry stories about the newly-published. (I’d recommend Writing Magazine anyway as an excellent way to keep in touch with the writing world). Depending on how thin the news is,  local papers can be interested in a local author.  (Sometimes news in local papers can be very thin indeed; my favourite local paper headline is “Worksop Man Dies Of Natural Causes”). There’s local radio, too.  That’s sometimes iffy in its results, though.  I did two and a half hours once on local radio.  I thoroughly enjoyed it but I can’t say I had a huge listening public. Peter was away and my Dad, a keen tennis fan, was watching Andy Murray.  One man rang in to ask if we could stop talking and play more music and another texted to say that he hadn’t got one of the jokes.  Ah well, you can’t win ’em all…

The internet though…  For anyone of a certain age – and in this context that means anyone roughly over twenty – it’s incredible how easy it is to be in touch with someone a few thousand miles away.  When A Hundred Thousand Dragons came out, I emailed the independent bookshops in the USA to tell them about it.  The addresses are there on the internet.  Beth Kanell of Kingdom Books, Vermont, read the book and really liked it (Yo! Result!) and submitted a review to the monthly round-up of books promoted by the Independent Booksellers’ Association – and bingo!  Dragons is a Killer Book.

Killer Book Top Five!

Hey, everyone, get a load of this!   Beth Kanell, Kingdom Books, Waterford VT, http://www.kingdombks.com sent a review of A Hundred Thousand Dragons to the Independent Mystery Booksellers’ Association of America for their Killer Books monthly roundup.  Five out of over a hundred books are chosen – and Dragons is one of them! To see the Killer Books page, go to http://www.killerbooks.org.

You could have knocked me down with a very small feather!

Tote that barge...

It was Scotland for the family holiday this year.  Not all of Scotland, of course, as there is a limit to how much time you can spend enjoying yourself, but the bit between Inverness and Fort William.  Now, if you have a gander on a map, you’ll see that to get to Inverness to Fort William involves a bit of Scotland that’s even wetter than the fairly damp country which surrounds it.

It’s the Great Glen, where, a very long time ago, the top of Scotland bumped into the mainland and hung about with lots of water in the middle.  That’s Loch Ness, Loch Oich and Loch Lochy (I think whoever named Loch Lochy got bored with thinking up something different to come at the end of the word “Loch”).  The bits in between are filled in with the Caledonian Canal.

We hired a boat from Caley Cruisers, and there we were; six of us, aged from 87 (Dad) to Jenny (16) and various assorted in the middle.  The thing you’ve got to remember about hiring a boat – the really important thing to remember about hiring a boat – is that you drive the thing.  All by yourself. Yes, there’s a training film.  Yes, the bloke from the boatyard tells you what to do when you climb on board, but he gets off, you know, and  it’s your boat and you’re in Loch Ness and the wind is a bit fresh and the rain’s coming down and it’s not half choppy and should the boat be bouncing like that?

Jenny retired to lie face down on her bunk and think about life.  Elspeth ditto.  Aged parent did the crossword in the cabin, Lucy entertained herself by standing on deck saying things like, “Wow, that’s a big wave,” and Peter, skipper’s cap firmly on his head, drove the boat.  Peter, thank goodness, absolutely loved driving the boat.  Very politely, at times during the following week, he’d offer to surrender the wheel and we, just as politely, reassured him that no, it was fine, he could do it.

I’d taken a shed-load of books to read but by jingo, I needn’t have bothered.  For one thing, I didn’t have time. On a beach, you see, the scenery stays still but on a boat, especially somewhere as gorgeous as the Great Glen, the scenery keeps nipping past you.  Or vice-versa, but you know what I mean.

And then there’s the ropes. The  front and back (or, to dazzle you with technical jargon, the prow and stern)  of the boat have ropes which have to be thrown off, passed round bollards and secured back on the boat, untied, hauled in, coiled up and this happens a lot. Obviously you have to tie the boat up when settling down for the night, but going through a lock requires an awful lot of rope-handling.  (Ironically, there aren’t any locks on the Lochs but there are on the canal.)  And tote that barge?  Yup, when it’s a series of locks, the only practical way to get the boat through is to haul it.  Ol’ Man River…

Oddly enough, the scourge of Scotland – midges- didn’t bother us.  I’ve been eaten alive in Fort William before now and had stocked up with enough repellent to equip an Amazon expedition.  I think the word got round and the midges retired, knowing when they were beaten, and went to chew on someone else instead.

It stopped raining for a couple of days and the place looked like paradise.  I shed two of the four layers of clothing I was wearing and got out the fishing rod.  Ho hum.  No fish in Scotland was harmed during the making of this holiday.  I caught some pond weed, but that was about it.  The fish and chip shops, on the other hand did a roaring trade.  We didn’t encounter the weirdness of the deep-fried Mars Bar but Lucy developed a liking for chip-shop haggis and black pudding.  It resembles fried loofah or a very old depth-charge and the innards, when you dig into it, look like old-fashioned mattress flocking.  It’s as well she had it on holiday because, believe you me, that’s one thing I’m certainly not going to try at home.

The Wanderer

If you, O Assiduous Reader, look on the comments beneath last week’s blog, you’ll find an erudite little exchange between Jane Finnis and myself, where we bat lines from Anglo-Saxon poetry around.  I must say, I was pretty pleased with myself for coming up with  The Wanderer as the source of those half-forgotten lines.  It’s years since I’ve read it, but the image had stuck in my mind.

There’s been some interest in various types of Ancient Brits recently, with treasures unearthed from the Anglo-Saxons and a huge pot of Roman coins being dug up by a bloke with a metal detector and – perhaps most striking of all – the discovery that a type of human was living in the British Isles three quarters of a million years ago – in Happisburgh, Norfolk, to be precise - many thousands of years before anyone had imagined possible.

We can’t ever know what a hominin from the Early Pleistocene (as the scientists describe them) would have thought.  Maybe, “Why on earth did I move from Africa to Norfolk?”  and “This flint’s damn hard” and “Is there any mammoth left for tea?”

We do know, however, a dickens of a lot about Romans and Anglo-Saxons.  That’s because they left us, in addition to the archaeology, some striking literature.  It’s fascinating to read ancient literature because it’s the one form of time-travel that’s genuinely authentic.  The Wanderer, for instance, takes us into the mind of a man who is wandering homeless after the death of his Lord, his protector and provider for his household, in a Britain where Roman ruins are thought to be the work of giants, where wolves hunt through the crumbling cities.  The Wanderer, poor guy, is heart-broken by the loss of his Lord.  You don’t get anything about romantic love in Anglo-Saxon literature, but you do get men mourning for their companions-in-arms.  A man’s loyalty belonged to his group (I simply don’t know about women) not to his wife.  The shared hall, not the private house, is the heart of the group.

Do you remember – it used to be taught in schools at one time – how the Venerable Bede in 7 something or other, describes the insight the new teaching of Christianity brought?  Our life is, he says, like a sparrow who flies in from a bitter winter’s night, into the hall, with its feast and its fire and light and then out again, into the darkness of winter once more.  Christianity, says Bede, illuminates the darkness.  The message is clear and the depiction of the hall is unforgettable.

Like anyone who writes history, even recent history, I sometimes get asked how I go about research.  Well, for the 1920’s, I do it exactly as I would hope someone writing a novel set in the 10^th Century would; read the books.  Read about the period if you like – why not?  Read other novels set in the period – again, why not? If you’re writing about the hominins of the Early Pleistocene, you might have a few problems, but if they wrote it, read it.  To get the absolutely authentic taste of the period, you have to read what they wrote themselves.  And sometimes, as with The Wanderer, there might have a few surprises in store.

Lessons From A Gigantic Leg

If you’ve bought or borrowed a copy of my latest book, A Hundred Thousand Dragons, then, apart from earning my grateful thanks, you’ll know that printed in the front is the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley.  Now, without giving too much away, the poem is there for a purpose.  I mean, it comes into the story. It’s far too much sweat for the Avid Reader to go chasing off after random pieces of poetry when reading a detective story, so I thought I’d print it in the front so, if moved to do so, the A.R. can simply flick to the front of the book.  It’s not just lugged in to give Dragons a bit of class, although I’ll have any bits of free class that are going! Just making life easier, don’t you know.  Always willing to please. All part of the service.



Ozymandias has always been a real favourite of mine.  It’s all mysterious and ancient and Egyptian in a sphinxandpyramidsandmummies sort of way, the spiritual precursor of all those hoaky old films where, having not troubled the general populace for millennia, the first thing any self-respecting mummy does on being dug up is wander around, inflicting grief on all in its path.  I can imagine the Poet Shelley punching the air, fighting off Coleridge, tripping up his mate Bryon and yelling, “Dibs on the old statue!” as he raced for his pen and muse.  Incidentally, The Poet Shelley is a phrase that cracks me up.  Jeeves often refers to The Poet Shelley as he attempts to broaden Bertie Wooster’s education.  On one occasion, Bertie, when closeted with the appallingly soppy Madeline Basset, says to her (he’s got the phrase from Jeeves) that his pal, Gussie, is “A sensitive plant”.  Madeline blinks at him and says, “You know your Shelley, Bertie.”  To which Bertie replies, “Oh? Am I?”

Anyway, back to Ozymandias.  You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with a theme as strong as that, you couldn’t go wrong.  The Poet Shelley certainly doesn’t.  Here’s his first few lines:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Magic!  But…  my pal Jane Finnis told me there was another poem called Ozymandias. This one’s by a bloke called Horace Smith. Smith was a friend of Shelley’s who had written his poem in competition with Shelley. It was published in the same magazine as Percy’s a month later.  And you can’t help thinking he was ill-advised. The title makes you think a bit, for a start: On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg

I don’t know why, but legs are funny.  A Farewell to Arms?  Yup.  A Farewell to Legs?  I don’t think so.  Particularly as this particular Leg seems to double as a sun-dial:  the Leg (Horace is responsible for the capitals, not me)

which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:

And so the next line, the punch-line, lacks a bit:
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand." The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

To be fair to Horace, the second bit, where he looks forward to a science-fictiony post-apocalyptic London is all right:
We wonder, and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place

However, that’s rather taken us away from his Leg.  It’s a shame, but it’s true.  It’s not enough to have a brilliant story.  You’ve got to tell it right, too.